can civilization survive without god hitchens vrs hitchens
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Can Civilization Survive Without God?
A Conversation with Christopher and Peter Hitchens
EVENT TRANSCRIPT October 12, 2010
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The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited brothers Christopher and Peter
Hitchens to address the question of whether civilization needs God.
Christopher is the author of more than 10 books, including his recent memoirHitch-
22and the best-selling manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
He is a contributing editor to The Atlanticand a columnist forVanity Fair. He has written
prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London
Review of Books, Granta, Harpers, Los Angeles Times Book Review,New LeftReview, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times
Literary Supplementand The Washington Post. In 2007, he received a National
Magazine Award for his work forVanity Fair.
Peter is the author of four books, including The Abolition of Britain, a major seller in that
country, and the recently published The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to
Faith, which he wrote to counter Christophers bookGod Is Not Great. A British
journalist, author and broadcaster, he currently writes forThe Mail on Sunday, where he
is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent. He is a contributor to (among
others) The Spectator, Prospect, Standpoint, The Guardian, The New Statesmanandthe American Conservative. Once an atheist, he attributes his return to faith largely to
his experience of socialism in practice, which he witnessed during his many years
reporting in Eastern Europe and his nearly three years as a resident correspondent in
Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. This year, he won the Orwell Prize for
Journalism for foreign reporting.
View video highlights from the event.
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Speakers:
Christopher Hitchens, Author, Contributing Editor to The Atlantic, Columnist forVanity
Fair
Peter Hitchens, Author, Columnist forThe Mail on Sunday
Moderator:Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Navigate This Transcript:
Christopher Hitchens Opening Remarks
Peter Hitchens Opening Remarks
On the Decline in Civilized Society
On the Brothers Relationship
Christopher on Prayers of Support
On Nietzsche and Human Will
On the Separation of Church and StateWhere Does Morality Come From?
Luis Lugo
LUIS LUGO, PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE: Good afternoon and thank
you all for coming. And a special thanks to Christopher and Peter Hitchens for being
with us today. Im Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. We
are a project of thePew Research Center, which is a nonpartisan organization that does
not take positions on issues or policy debates not even on the question of the
existence of the Almighty. This event is part of the Pew Forum luncheon series in whichwe bring together journalists and important public figures for serious discussions on
topics at the intersection of religion and public affairs.
Our format at these events is really very, very simple. We ask our guests to speak for
about 10 minutes or so. Then we invite the rest of you to join in the conversation. I
should point out that this event is on the record and we are taping it. And our friends at
CNN, as you can see, are also videotaping it. So just be aware of that.
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At this time, I would like to introduce Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, who is an advisor to the Pew Forum. Mike did all the heavy lifting in pulling the
panel together, and so for that, he gets the privilege of moderating this event.
We have a few out-of-town journalists listening in via conference call, and I would like to
welcome them as well. Those of you on the call who would like to take part in thediscussion and we encourage that please e-mail your questions. Well make sure
to work your questions into the queue.
Again, its great to have all of you here and via phone with us. We welcome you to the
Pew Research Center. Mike, over to you.
Michael Cromartie
MICHAEL CROMARTIE, ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER:Thank you, Luis,
and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. If you have a bio right in front of you, which I know
you do, I am not one of those moderators who then turns around and reads that bio toyou. I think that you know why youre here. You know both these men by reputation,
and their biographies are in front of you. What I would like to do, though, is just give an
anecdote or two about our speakers.
Christopher, as many of you all know, has a new book out now called Hitch-22: A
Memoir. I went back and looked at some reviews of the book, and I thought I would try
to find something in the reviews about Christopher. In The New York Times, the
reviewer highlights Christophers great capacity for friendship. Hes very moved by the
fact that in this autobiography Christopher has such wonderful things to say about his
lifelong friends. In fact, thereviewer says, He is also devoted to friendship.Hitch-22is
among the loveliest paeans to the dearness ofones friends Ive ever read. The
business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchenss personality can make him seem, whether
you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.
Then in another review in The New York Times, thereviewer saysthis: The truth is, by
Hitchenss standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is
surprisingly unstrident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. Hes not
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claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And
perhaps the strongest theme in Hitch-22is just this that sometimes the balance
sheets are an unholy mess.
By the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to keeping two sets of books,
passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the GridironClub by night. Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can
certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match,
and its touching inHitch-22to see how often hell race to the other side of the court to
return his own serve, which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, hes so hard
to dislike.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you someone who, even when you disagree with him
politically or religiously, is so very hard to dislike. Christopher?
Christopher Hitchens
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, is it my turn already?
CROMARTIE:Youre on.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I want to say that I was very impressed while reading
Peters latest book to which I commend your attention to see that he had written a
particular (audio break) long before he can have read a book I hope you will also
all be reading, which is Diarmaid MacCullochs extraordinary history of Christianity. I
dont know how many people here have tried it yet. But its really an admirable,beautifully written book.
Its argued from the viewpoint of a fairly faithful Anglican, whatever that may turn out to
be. Its written, anyway, from a Christian perspective and with an absolutely
extraordinary control of scholarship and prose. One of the things it says very
sobering for a Christian reader, I would suppose, to read is this:
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There used to be a word which could be used unironically, and it was used, really, until
not much more than a century, a century-and-a-half ago. People could say, and mean
what they said when they said the word, Christendom. There was a Christian world. It
had been partly evolved, partly carved out by the sword, partly defended by the sword,
at some points giving way, at other times expanding. But it was a meaningful name for a
community of belief and value that endured for many, many centuries and has manysplendors to its name.
And its all gone; no one could use that term now without either great nostalgia or some
degree of irony. Its all gone for the reason MacCulloch gives exactly the reason
Peter gives in his book. It destroyed itself, Christendom, and it destroyed itself by the
tremendous criminal act of urging its members to kill each other in the outbreak of the
Great War, as it was then known but it wasnt known that it would lead to a huge and
even worse part two in 1914, where the king-emperor of the British empire, who was
also the head of the Church of England, and the Russian czar, who was also the head
of the Russian Orthodox Church, and you follow the road
Theres a partial exemption to be made here for the French empire, which didnt
precisely go to war in the name of its religion. But all the others did, and they leveled
Christian civilization, European civilization, to a point where we still have no idea how
much weve lost and how greatly our development as a species and as a society has
been retarded. Out of the ruins of it, and striding across those poisoned ruins, came the
great totalitarianisms that very nearly put an end to what remained of what could be
called, by then certainly not Christendom, but of European and Russian civilization.
So this discussion that were having is by no means a new one and doesnt involve such
a new thought. Weve had to wrestle for a very long time with the idea, what will we doabout civilization; what will we do about values, ethics, morals; how will we teach them;
how will we learn to live with one another in the absence of any real religious authority,
any credible one, any one thats worthy of the name, worthy of respect? This absence
has been felt for a very, very long time, long before I was able to start writing about it.
I would just add, because I think its of extraordinary interest, that most of those empires
have since passed away. Some of them won the war, nominally, and some of them lost
it, nominally. Theyve more or less accepted the implied defeat in the long run, but two
of them are in a rather sinister way, in my judgment, in the process of recrudescing
the Ottoman Empire, the caliphate, which very ill-advisedly went to war on the side ofWilhelmine German and Austro-Hungarian imperialism, throwing its own empire into the
ring and declaring a world jihad from the throne of the caliph himself in Constantinople,
making it obligatory on all the faithful to kill at least two nonbelievers as long as those
nonbelievers were not German, Austrian or Hungarian, since it was the German,
Austrian and Hungarian treasuries that were actually paying for the promulgation of this
jihad.
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Not only did the caliphate lose the war, but it lost its caliphate; it was dissolved by
Mustapha Kemal [Ataturk]. But its interesting, its one of the two thats trying to come
back. Now you can go to a meeting in Kensington in London, if you wish, or on the Left
Bank, or in the Kreuzberg in Berlin, and you can go to the caliphate club. Itll be quite
well attended; therell be quite a lot of people who say that the only salvation of
humanity, the only true morality, the only real faith will come when all the Muslim ummais once again united in fact, somewhat expanded, to take in, for example, Spain and
other territories lost in previous combats.
Its a real movement, and were going to be living with it for the rest of our lives. And
those who think that faith-based is the prefix to something positive have a lot of
argument, I think, ahead of them when they confront people who really mean it like that.
The second of the two empires that took part in this hecatomb of civilization in the name
of their own religion, I mean the Russian one, shows real signs also of imperial
nostalgia. No one here, I suppose, will have forgotten the moment when George Bushfirst met Vladimir Putin, who had chosen for the day to decorate his chest with his
grandmothers ornate Russian Orthodox crucifix, enough for the president to be
convinced and to say that just to look into those beautiful limpid eyes was enough to
see that he was a person of deep spirituality and sensitivity.
I think, by the way, in a fairly strong field, thats one of the stupidest things any president
has ever said. But now you dont have to use much of your imagination when you see at
the inauguration when Putin wants to make someone prime minister, and when he
says, how can he make himself czar again down the road all these inaugural
ceremonies are attended by black-cowled patriarchs swinging their incenses,
demanding and getting in return privileges over other churches and other religions inRussia, restoring the same political and clerical balance, roughly, that did underpin
Russian absolutism and autocracy until the great catastrophe of 1914.
Christopher Hitchens
And thats comingback, too, and I think we dont pay anything like enough attention to
this fusion of traditional great Russian chauvinism and police regime with the clerical
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bodyguard and prop and stay and ally that its appointed for itself. But now it goes
without saying that Im speaking to the question of, how compatible is civilization with
religion?
But so far, those are the only two empires that do show this sign of religious revival. Its
equally true to say that in huge parts of what we might call the industrialized modernworld, tens of millions of people, in effect, live in a post-religious society. Its hard to
argue, I think, that they lead conspicuously less-civilized lives than their predecessor
generations, than the ones of 1914 or 1939.
We havent yet conquered the problem of alienation or of anomie or of spiritual waste or
of the fear of death. That has to be worked on. And we have a problem with moral
relativism, that religion in its inaudible supremacy equally failed to solve. But I
dont think its really true to say that we live less-civilized a life than those of our
predecessors who felt that there was a genuine religious authority that spoke with
power.
Its actually more than half a century since George Orwell wrote that the problem of
civilization would be exactly this. He said, how will we now inculcate ethics, teach
morality, to the people, to the majority, in the absence of a spiritual authority that
commands respect and that has innate presence, that has the respect? With this
decline in the authority of religion, how shall we teach ethics and morals?
It remains a very, very good question. Id pause to mention that George Orwell himself,
a very convinced atheist with a very strong and rooted respect for liturgy and for
scripture and for tradition, made quite a good shot, in living his own life and evolving his
own writing, in showing how, in fact, it is possible to lead an ethical existence withoutsupernatural support or any appeal to it. But that might be choosing a rather too-
favorable example to my own argument.
The truth is that if we just look at our own society, what do we really find? I was very
interested to see the recent findings of our hosts today about how much Americans
really know about their own religion how few Catholics really know what the
sacrament is, for example, how very few Protestants know who Martin Luther was, how
very few I was very surprised by this how very few Jews appear to know that
Maimonides was one of them a Jew, as you will and so forth.
But it shouldnt really have surprised me, I dont think. Thomas Jefferson said in what I
used to think of as a disastrously non-prescient letter I think it was to his nephew,
Peter Carrthat there isnt a young American born today who will not die a Unitarian.
Well, thats one of the things T.J. didnt get exactly right. But if you go around the public
halls and the provincial theaters, as I do whenever I can, and engage with belief and the
believers, youll find to an extraordinary extent that a kind of ethical humanism with a
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vague spiritual content is extremely commonplace. I can take 10 bucks off most
Catholics by asking them the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the
Virgin Birth. Ive known all about how to do that long before Pew alerted me to the
opportunity (laughter).
There are people who combine a sort of Anglicism with a kind of Buddhism its not atall uncommon or Hinduism. I would say that the American Jewish population is in its
majority effectively post-religious. It has, I would prefer to say, transcended its
monotheism and become an ethical humanism. Certainly in the Reform, and to a great
degree the Conservative congregations, thats already the case, and everybody knows
that on non-scriptural but, as it were, moral matters the American Catholic community
has what is called by them a cafeteria Catholic, or an la carte manner to it. In other
words, it picks and chooses what might or might not be convenient to believe.
This is shallow, to be certain, and its thin, but Im not sure if it isnt preferable to a more
decided, enforced orthodoxy, in connection with which, because I know Im trespassingon your time, Ill try and put it in the form of a question. Its a thought experiment, if you
like, which Ill leave you with. Notice how in your daily newspaper intake, media intake,
the much-maligned word secular has acquired on some pages of the newspaper,
namely the international ones, almost the character of a positive. It has lost its
pejorative character almost entirely.
In other words, suppose you were to read today that the new prime minister of Iraq was
the leader of a secular force that didnt have any religious allegiance. Would you be, A,
terribly upset, B, enormously relieved or, three, thrilled beyond measure? (Laughter.)
Ought you to be thinking this, those of you of faith?
What if someone was to say a leader would emerge in Iran, an opposition leader, with
genuine support among the intellectuals and inaudible and the downtrodden
workers and peasants, who was to say, you know what? Ive never believed a word of
this story about the upcoming 12th imam and his reappearance and his bringing of a
reign of peace and redemption to the whole human race. I think thats an absolute fairy
story; I think thats got about as much chance of being true as Santa Claus. Would you
not be rather relieved to hear that there was such a person? I submit that you most
certainly would.
If you heard today that Bibi Netanyahu on yet another of his fraudulent trips toWashington to humiliate our president and our Congress had dispensed with the
services of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the religious partnership in his coalition,
who calls for God to smite the Palestinians with a plague, for example that this man
no longer appointed the person who is in charge of housing and settlements, which a
matter of fact, he does. Would you not think that was a step in the right direction? I
submit that you would.
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So it may be rude to leave you with a question rather than proposing an answer, but I
think youll see why I have done so, and I now make way for a younger and more
principled generation.
CROMARTIE: Thank you, Christopher. A biography of Peter is in front of you, but I
would just call your attention to something that he wrote in his new book, The RageAgainst God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. In April 2008, they had a debate in Grand
Rapids, Mich., on the existence of God Christopher and Peter did and he wrote
this:
Somehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I
am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected
and some might have hoped that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not.
At the end I concluded that while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended
the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was, and
remains, more important to me than the debate itself.
Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when
Christopher and I had met in his Washington, D.C. apartment. If he despised and
loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasnt showing it. To my astonishment,
Christopher cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still havent got
over it.
Edward Lucas ofThe Economistdescribed Peter as a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and
brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary
coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to
places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behavior at homeand abroad.
I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Hitchens.
Peter Hitchens
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PETER HITCHENS: Thank you. The question, first of all, is what civilization might be. I
doubt whether we can agree on that very quickly, since we probably cant even agree
on how to spell it on either side of the Atlantic. I would really like to start by explaining
what it isnt and to recount some experiences of mine in places where it had ceased tobe.
The first one, picture me, if you will, in a blue suit and polished leather shoes sitting on
top of a pile of cargo in a retired Soviet aircraft rather, Soviet aircraft which ought to
have been retired landing at Mogadishu Airport one winters afternoon shortly before
sunset. I wont explain quite how stupid I had been to get myself into this position, but I
was working at that time for a daily newspaper which had accepted a suggestion of
mine, unexpectedly, that I should go to Mogadishu just before the U.S. Marines arrived,
as they thought, to rescue the Somalis from famine and chaos.
Arriving at Mogadishu Airport is an experience some of you may have had and some of
you may not. What I can tell you is this: There is no passport control. There is no
baggage reclaim. In fact, as you land, sitting on top of the baggage, it slides the length
of the aircraft as the brakes go on, which has made me take aircraft safety precautions
with a total lack of seriousness ever since. Its rather enjoyable, actually, when the
baggage slides down the whole length of the plane.
Youre met at the end of the runway by a man from The Associated Press who is
collecting all the water and supplies for his bureau, and by about 15 young men with
AK-47s, who approach you and say, do you want a bodyguard? And you turn to the
man from The Associated Press and you say, do I want a bodyguard? And he says, yesyou do. If you dont have a bodyguard, youll be dead and stripped by morning.
So we hire, myself and my colleague, John Downing, we hire one of these in fact,
two of these bodyguards and a car with no upholstery, and we drive into Mogadishu
just in time to see the departing ranks of the gangs and tribal formations which are
supposed to be driven away by the arrival of the U.S. Marines. They are, in fact, going.
Theyre going into the sunset with their machine guns and their bandannas they look
like heavily armed rock stars because they know that there is no point in being there
when the Marines arrive, and they intend to come back later and do whatever it is they
do.
We circle around, looking for some time for somewhere to spend the night. And only by
great good fortune, because departing around a corner, my colleague sees somebody
he knows from Sarajevo, do we find anywhere to spend the night. We are allowed into a
compound which has been rented by some German television people, who share with
us their camel stew and allow us to sleep on their concrete floor. I go to sleep listening
that evening to the cries of dying people and the chatter of gunfire outside and hearing,
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in effect, what would have happened to me if I hadnt found my way into the German
compound.
The following day I find people to take me round; were nearly murdered on one
occasion because my interpreter is from the wrong tribe. I see a scene of complete
desolation. Every building has bullet holes, or indeed, shell holes in it. The main street iscompletely stripped bare of every feature of modern civilization. Its just a stretch of mud
with potholes in it with loping persons on it carrying weapons and no guarantee that
they wont use them on you. All the physical features of civilization and all the, as it
were, intangible features of civilization civility, safety, the ability to rely on your
neighbor, the passing person, for any kind of kindness or consideration have gone.
Eventually, with great relief, I got out of Mogadishu and I got home and was shown a
few weeks afterwards a photograph of the same street which I had seen on that evening
and on the following morning. Mogadishu having been an Italian colony, the street
scene was actually rather Roman: pleasantly dressed people strolling along well-keptsidewalks, expensive cars gliding up and down a smooth road, telephone kiosks,
pavement cafes.
The distance between that and what I saw was approximately 20 years, and it came to
me and it has stayed with me ever since, whenever I walk down a pleasant street in
Oxford, where I live, or indeed roam around Dupont Circle here or any major civilized
city, this is not permanent. This is not here automatically. It is not as the air we breathe
or the water we drink. It is as a result of certain unusual conditions which do not always
exist and which have come about only for a very short period of time in a very limited
number of places, and which even having been established, can come to an end.
This experience came on top of two years living in what, when I arrived, was the capital
city of the Soviet Union and what, when I left, was the capital city of the Russian
Federation. And there I also saw a very curious civilization which was not a civilization.
That is to say, there was very little civility on the street between people. I was always
struck by this. I would go down into what were always told in the tourist manuals is the
magnificent Moscow Metro.
Because of the horrendously ruthless climate, the stations are guarded by very heavy
wooden swing doors, or were in those days, and I would hold them open for people as
they came into the stations behind me, and they would step back with a look of mistruston their faces, as if I was playing a sort of joke on them. They were completely unused
to the idea that anyone might do this. There wasnt even that level of consideration.
Nobody in any kind of public dealing would trust you. Almost everything had to be
obtained through whispered threats and bribes.
By contrast, if you were invited into the homes of Russians, you were immediately led
into a warm and entirely civilized circumstance of complete mutual obligation and trust
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in that very, very narrow and very, very small society. It was the family and the
immediate friends where people knew whom they could trust and to whom they could
show obligation and from whom they could expect it.
Now, you may say that this has to do with the climate or the economic conditions. I dont
happen to believe this, and if any of you would be kind enough to take a look at mybook, I hope I have explained to some extent how this had come about. These two
experiences, one on top of the other, persuaded me that it was worthwhile to think of
what it was in our civilization that we ought to value.
There was one other thing, and Christopher will be slightly familiar with part of this.
When we were growing up in the early 1960s and late 1950s, we lived for a short while
in a very pleasant suburb of what was then the British naval base at Portsmouth. Now
that we no longer have a navy, it is no longer that but it was then, and it was a very
secluded, soft, comfortable, safe place in which we could wander about unsupervised
for hours. Our parents could send us off and not worry about what would become of us.I cant imagine, actually, anywhere more typical of English suburbia at the time.
While I was in Moscow, I had access to an immensely elaborate precursor of the
Internet, the wire services that my newspaper received, one of them being the Press
Association, the domestic one. And I was astonished one evening to be reading the wire
services and to see the name of this suburb, Alverstoke, come up in a story. In that
story what had happened was that somebody had been involved in an altercation with a
group of people going past his front yard who had been kicking his garden fence in. As
a result of trying to tell them to stop doing this, he had been kicked to death. And I
thought: Alverstoke kicked to death what has happened to the country that I grew
up in?
Peter Hitchens
When I got back, I found that there was more and more of this sort of thing going on.
Any of you who are interested, I urge I havent got time to go into the cases now to
Google the cases of two people, one, Fiona Pilkington and her daughter, strangely
named Francecca, and the other, a man called Garry Newlove, Garry with two Rs, and
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you will see that in large parts of England, particularly in the poorer parts, the behavior
of individual human beings towards one another has sunk to levels not far distant from
the Stone Age.
Mr. Newlove did very much as the person in Alverstoke did. There were people
misbehaving in the street outside, and he went and remonstrated with them, and theybeat him to the ground and this phrase occurs very often in newspaper reports in
Britain they then kicked his head as if it were a football until he died.
In the case of Fiona Pilkington, her daughter was disabled and not very well-favored to
look at, and as a result, they were ceaselessly persecuted by their neighbors. Their
house was pelted with eggs and flour; they were shouted at and screamed at until their
lives became a total misery. Mrs. Pilkington eventually snapped under this pressure,
took her daughter with her out into the country, set fire to the car and burned them both
to death in a hideous murder and suicide of a type which I hope is unimaginable to any
of you but which seemed to be a reasonable conclusion to her troubles.
In both cases, they found it almost impossible to get the attention of the authorities,
though, of course, after the events became highly public, the authorities began to take
some interest and notice. But in fact, this kind of thing is so common at a low level in the
grimmer suburbs of English cities that it is actually normal for a lot of people.
This was not the case until quite recently. How has this decline in civilization come
about? Well, I think it has come about at least partly and Im not a single-cause
person but at least partly because there is no longer in the hearts of the English
people the restraint of the Christian religion, which used to prevent this sort of behavior.
I think it would be completely idle to imagine that the two things were unconnected. I
havent come here to say that civilizations impossible without religion or indeed without
Christianity. There are non-Christian civilizations. There are civilized countries which
arent really based upon religion at all, such as Japan, which I think any visitor there will
agree is an intensely civilized place.
But the extraordinary combination, which you in this country and I in mine used to enjoy
and may for some time continue to, of liberty and order seems to me only to occur
where people take into their hearts the very, very powerful messages of self-restraint
without mutual advantage, which is central to the Christian religion.
Without that, you reach a kind of, what I term, practical atheism, which is not a term
which would be used by the people who actually engage in it because they probably
could neither spell nor pronounce atheism, but which does seem to me to be a fair
summary of the way in which people behave. If we can agree even to begin to agree
here that there might be some truth in any of that, then some discussion can take place.
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What Ive found objectionable about a great deal of the attack upon religion thats been
taking place on both sides of the Atlantic in the English-speaking world in the past few
years has been the dismissal and the contempt and the scorn and even what seems to
me to be the dislike expressed over and over again for the Christian faith and for the
good things that religion does and the unwillingness to accept that there are any of
those good things, that the turning of the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of thejust is something which could conceivably be obtained together with liberty by some
other method.
I dont think thats true, and I think in a serious argument about it, the n the atheists
would need to concede that it wasnt entirely true, and in conceding that, might be
willing to hold the argument on a slightly narrower field from the one where they
currently hold it. Ill leave it at that.
CROMARTIE: Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Christopher, well, well get you in, in a
minute. Peter David?
Peter David
PETER DAVID, THE ECONOMIST: Peter, if I could respond to what you just said. You
gave two very telling examples of societies or places where there has been an utter loss
of moral compass. One was Mogadishu and the other was your former suburb in
Portsmouth. But what struck me is that in the Portsmouth case you seem to argue that it
is secular values or at least the loss of religious values that is at least partly to account
for what had happened, whereas I would have thought that Somalia was quite a pious
country, albeit not a Christian country.
PETER HITCHENS: The point I make about Somalia is, actually, here is a place where
civilization was and is not. To go into the history of the foreign interventions in Somalia
which largely led to that is a different issue. The only point I was making here was that
civilization can cease to exist when forces either from inside or from outside can bring it
to an end.
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I think almost certainly in the case of a country such as Britain or even possibly the
United States the threat is much more likely to be internal. But the questions which
really arise here are: What is the source of authority? Why should people behave better
than they need to? Why should there ever be a situation in which the strong should be
under the control of law? Why should law ever, ever trump power in any system? And
why should that restraint exist?
Why should people be brought up to have manners and to show restraint and civility to
others? How is it going to happen that they will do so? And if it ceases to happen, how
quickly will you reach the stage where it will be wiser to stay inside your house at night
than to go out, which is pretty much the state that we were in, in the 13th or 14th
century?
What I often get in response from people when I say that things are getting pretty bad in
Britain is, well, if you look at the records of Oxford in the 14th century, it was just as bad
as it is now. I say, yeah, absolutely. But we have had an interval between now and the14th century when we thought we were making progress, and now were traveling rather
rapidly backwards.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Just only on the Hitchensian stuff, if I may, because
otherwise that precious fragment might get lost. Say, of course, that law is being
reestablished in parts of Mogadishu. Already, the law is called sharia; the people
enforcing it are called the al-Shabab. They know exactly how much people want
government rather than anarchy, and theyve had a plan for this for a long time. Anarchy
is originally part of that plan, by the way. Create the anarchy first, then people will call
for your law. Thats how the Taliban took power. This is just another way of rephrasing
the problem of the faith-based.
As to my memories of Alverstoke, I have to say Im shocked to hear that story, even at
this remove. Even in those days, we knew we were lucky. Our parents would not have
said you can go into Portsmouth and hang around the railway station or the docks any
old time of day or night. No, in fact, we were constantly being enjoined to beware of the
rough and the lumpen element that was noticeable in English life.
Then there were cities where you couldnt even imagine, where everyone your
school friends would talk about, do you know what happens in Glasgow on the
housing estates? This is in exactly the 50s and 60s when the authority of the Church ofEngland was much greater than it is now. Glasgow, youd get your eyes cut out with a
broken bottle if inaudible particular students looked at you. It was partly true.
Glasgow, the most religious city in the country, where people would kill you over what
kind of Christian you were, as a matter of fact.
We hadnt then realized how bad the situation was in Northern Ireland, where constant
violence, incivility, sadism, combined with all the things that go with clerical rule and
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politics backwardness, stupidity, unemployment, low standards of education and
hygiene. The place was a complete slum. And what distinguished it from the rest of the
United Kingdom? The fact that the priests had authority there and people were willing to
swing a boot or a bottle in the name of faith. Thats what made the difference.
PETER HITCHENS: May I make a brief riposte? Part of the problem that we had withthe rough parts of town was Im afraid that our mother, particularly, was a bit of a
snob. I do remember one occasion. We had the groceries delivered and in the box
which had come from the grocers was a jar of peanut butter, which I seized on and
began to eat before my mother was out when the delivery came. When she came
back, she said, whats this? Peanut butter? We dont have that in this house! And she
rang the grocers and demanded they come and take it back and forbade me to eat any
more because it was not the kind of thing that the children of a naval officer ought to
eat.
When we lived in an even more salubrious part of the country, on the edge of Dartmoor,there was a small estate of prefabs inhabited by people who were known as the rough
boys, with whom we were not allowed to associate. I dont think the danger from them
was actually very great. The main danger was we might have picked up their accents.
I do think that the other thing Christopher does tend to do is to surge off into the wider
and more political side of this matter. Yes, of course, the Northern Irish problem and
indeed in Glasgow a similar problem of Protestant and Catholic sectarianism is, was
and, I fear, for many years will be great. But in terms of the lives which people led, the
way in which they behaved towards their neighbors, the way in which children were
brought up, the manners which people displayed, I dont think you will find that the effect
of Christian upbringing was small in the 1950s or 1960s.
Whats happened to Northern Ireland and indeed to Scotland and indeed the whole of
Britain in that period is the invasion of trash culture and the collapse of all that kind of
teaching. And theres an enormous amount of protection racket, gangster-ish thuggery
there carried on in the name of religious factionalism, but not, I think, generally by
people who are enthusiastic churchgoers or ever were.
There is this problem with the utopian view of the world, which I dont share, that you do
like to concentrate on the big things. Can we bring democracy or civilization to X? Can
we defeat such and such all around the world rather than can we actually construct, inthe square mile around where we live, a civil society in which people can live in freedom
and order? Which seems to me to be, actually, just as important if not more so and
often rather harder in execution than launching missiles or sending armies to the other
side of the world with dubious consequences.
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Barbara Bradley Hagerty
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR:Im going to turn this to the personal, if I
might. I was listening to a BBC a Radio 4 interview with both of you back from
2007, and it appeared to be fairly acrimonious between the two of you. Do you
remember that one?
PETER HITCHENS:If its the one Im thinking of, it was very brief.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: Well, not by NPR standards.
PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, but with the BBC, unlike your own wonderful organization, if
youre me and youre interviewed by it, you know youve got 15 seconds before they
interrupt you. So youve got to be quick.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: What was interesting about listening to this kind of three-way,
as we would call it at NPR, is that it was really fairly acrimonious. I didnt hear a lot of
brotherly love in that. It was hard to detect that. Im just wondering if there has been a
change in the way you all view each other, view your arguments about, say, the
existence of God or life after death, that kind of thing, the necessity of religion to have a
moral civilization. Has any of that tenor changed since, Christopher, you have been
diagnosed?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:I dont think my own tenor has changed. The relationship I
have with Peter is very well encapsulated in the fragment of his book that Michael read
at the beginning. I mean, if you want to know, if anything, my contempt for the forcedconsolation of religion has increased since I became aware that I probably dont have
very long to live. But its not a thing I want to make a particular point on in this argument.
BRADLEY HAGERTY:If I could just follow up with one thing. Theres been a fairly
public discussion of the fact that you have sometimes been offended but sometimes
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warmed by the fact that people are praying for you or thinking of you. Id like to ask you
to elaborate on that last statement about your contempt because in my reading of what
youve said recently, it seemed as if perhaps you were cheered a little bit or warmed by
some expressions of belief.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, you have the floor and youre insisting, so in spite ofmy reluctance obviously, expressions of solidarity are very welcome and very
touching to me in whatever form they take. I do resent, always have resented, the idea
that it should in some way be assumed that now that you may be terrified, say, or
miserable or, as it might be, depressed, surely now would be a perfect time for you to
abandon the principles of a lifetime.
Ive always thought this to be rather a repulsive mode of approach, and theres a
disgusting history of people either attempting to inflict deathbed conversions on people
like Thomas Paine in their extremity or making up lies about it afterwards, as they did
about Charles Darwin and many others. That I find wholly contemptible.
But its only vestigially applied in my case; surely, I ought to think more about these
things now than I would anyway. No, not at all. Ive already thought about them a great
deal. Thanks all the same. An interesting point Ill make well, you be the judge of
whether its interesting or not. (Laughter.)
A point of it is this: I read a long time ago, when I was still, as far as I knew, in good
health, a study of intercessory prayer, the most comprehensive one thats ever been
done. And it showed, not at all to my surprise, that the res no correlation to be found
between intercessory prayer and the thriving or otherwise of those for whom the prayers
are designed or offered.
Except it was found that among some people who knew they were being prayed for by
groups of colleagues and friends, there was a slight negative result in point of morale. If
they didnt get better, they felt bad about not getting better after all the trouble that had
been taken. I thought, thats interesting. And now, I realize how true it might be because
I get a lot of secular encouragement.
People say, cancer picked the wrong foe in you. You can beat this if anyone can. Lots
of that kind of thing, and it actually does have the effect of slightly giving me the blues
because I dont want to let people down. For whatever interest that may be, I think it
shows that the psychological makeup of this is roughly the same whether you assume a
supernatural dimension or not.
PETER HITCHENS: Speaking for the religious side of the argument, I also think it
would be quite grotesque to imagine that someone would have to get cancer to see the
merits of religion. Its an absurd idea. I dont know why anyone imagines that it should
be so.
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CROMARTIE: But Barbara, you had something more, I think, in your question about
their relationship. And so Peter, can you address any of that.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:I thought wed done that.
CROMARTIE:Well, Christopher did. I didnt know if Peter wanted to comment.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I was quoting Peter.
CROMARTIE: I was quoting him, actually. (Laughter.) Yeah, I actually quoted you I
did it for you.
PETER HITCHENS: Look, one of the things that I remember discovering with the most
happiness in my life, round about the age of 11 or 12, was that it was possible to
disagree without anger or rancor. And in fact, its actually more pleasant to do so. Ive
always thought that, and I really dont see the point in spoiling a good argument by
getting angry with your opponent. And he has been my opponent for most of my life. Icertainly have in the past been angry with him, but I would say that that is over.
Michael Gerson
MICHAEL GERSON, THE WASHINGTON POST: Let me ask a little more philosophical
question. Id really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the
challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics,
which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all youre left with is a ferocious
human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or aprophet in these areas from both brothers.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.
GERSON: Yeah, please do.
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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine,
all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. Thats
why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know
for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be
admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot
of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they said,was I an admirerof Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasnt really much of one at
all.
They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that
hed written most of his antireligious books in a state of inaudible syphilitic
paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly
alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own (laughter)
more recent I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.
Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equallytrue to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could
deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine
warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do
so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think its a very, very strong
instance of it.
If I dont get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isnt that, its
usually The Brothers Karamazovinstead. I forget which brother it is, or maybe its
Smerdyakov. It doesnt matter. It says, if theres no God, then surely everything is
possible thinkable.
Everyone understands the question when its put like that. But is it not also the case that
with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to
anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable
according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human
society and the human psyche you might say, soul whatever attitude we take to
the humanness or the transcendent.
PETER HITCHENS: First of all, just a small objection to that. It seems to me that the
Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one
of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, ofshow trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.
There is even in the jibe against Judas "the poor ye have always with you" the first
skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that
you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order
people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is
indeed tortured to death by the powerful.
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But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche
because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very
seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset
Maughams book,Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides and this is an
Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage
decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, "This is a moment ofenormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before,
and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. Im free."
What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to
atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. Im just as capable of following moral rules
as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and
immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists refusal to accept that there is actually
no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.
Why arent they more pleased theyre liberated and why dont they exult more about it?Perhaps because they dont want to spread the idea too widely and have too many
people joining in.
David Aikman
DAVID AIKMAN, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: This is a question primarily for
Christopher. I think everybody around the table would agree that the presence of
Taliban-type regimes or sharia-oriented regimes in places like Mogadishu are
absolutely horrible examples of what could go wrong when people of certain kind of
beliefs take power. And I dont exclude the history of Christendom from having moments
like that. Nevertheless, I want to ask, can you think of any historical period anycivilization in which a regime that has basically eschewed the divine in all its forms
has fostered a degree of civilization among human beings? And Peter, of course, you
can answer that, too.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Eschew would mean to forbear from practicing or praising
the teaching of religion. Thats not the sort of thing a regime can actually do. What
regimes usually do typically is either coexist with religion try to co-opt it or, in
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some very extreme cases, try to do away with and/or nationalize it, as in the case of the
French and Russian Revolutions, for example. You make it part of the state while
repudiating much of its doctrine. We havent been able to run a fair test yet, it seems to
me.
I mean, if there was to be a society that taught the principles of Thomas Paine andThomas Jefferson, Baruch Spinoza Benedict Spinoza, as he later was Albert
Einstein, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell taught the children to learn and
understand those teachings and ethics and the other things that go with them, I dont
think it would be a bad thing.
I think the United States comes the closest to any society that we know about that
decides that religious pluralism because civilization is impossible without freedom of
conscience, and therefore, it goes without saying that there has to be freedom of
worship, that thats best guaranteed by a state that takes no notice of eschews, as
you might put it, any role at all in determining religious matters.
AIKMAN:But if I may respond to that, Christopher, I think, again, it doesnt take much
looking at the founders of the United States to see that the vast majority of them
believed in the practice of Christian ethics and indeed were actually believers in some
sort of divinity, even if they werent orthodox Christians. Certainly, they were either
deists or some form of Christian churchgoers. And yet, its clear, if you look at them, that
very few of them seemed to believe that it was possible to hold together a society
unless people were inspired by ethical traditions, basically, under the guise of believing
in divine right and wrong.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:I just disagree with you. Its certainly not true of the twowho matter most to me, or matter most to this argument, namely Mr. Jefferson and Mr.
Madison, who together offered the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which is
almost exactly, really, the basis of the First Amendment to our Constitution, which is the
relevant one.
Jefferson most certainly was not a Christian. He seemed to me to have had great dislike
for it. I cant prove he was an atheist, though I could poin t you to letters that he wrote
that strongly suggest to me that he privately was one. It doesnt matter. Its interesting,
but its not decisive.
James Madison, though he didnt dare say so in his lifetime, didnt think there should be
chaplains in the armed forces. He didnt think that Congress proceedings should even
be opened by a man of God. He was an absolutist on the separation point. And
therefore, in some sense, it wouldnt matter even if he was a devout believer. The point
would be the same. The separation is the important thing. And surely, I appeal to those
of you who do regard yourselves as believers, its just as important to prevent the
church being tainted by the state as the state being run by the church.
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The pope is still fornicating with the emperor, as Dante puts it. Bad for both, one
imagines.
Peter Hitchens
PETER HITCHENS: The thing which strikes me about societies which are preferable
and the societies which I wouldnt want to stay in for any longer than I absolutely have
to is that the ones which are preferable do have the rule of law. This seems to me to be
the distinction between a tolerable free society and one which is not, which is the most
decisive.
And Im fascinated by the origin of the idea of the rule of law, that you could have a
circumstance in which a person with physical power, with enormous wealth, was
compelled by forces which he could not challenge to abide by the law, which is a thing
without substance and which, in theory, he could overcome.
I think the origin of that has to be and must be the idea of an unalterable truth at theheart of the law. English judges and English laws are always seeking in the common
law I think the same tradition exists here to discover what the law is, and what
theyre trying to discover seems to me to be based on an assumption that there is an
ultimate truth about what the law should be about.
Without that, in the end, you have nothing except the variable needs of human power. It
does seem to me, again, to be idle of the atheist cause to turn their backs so completely
on their friends in the Russian Social Democratic Party, brackets, B for Bolshevik, which
was so very much their ally to the extent that one of its earliest decrees, the Lenin-
Trotsky Decree, was for the prevention of the teaching of religion in schools, and indeed
outside schools. It even decreed that the word God, which is in Russian, should
no longer be spelled with a capital letter. It was devoted to the extirpation of religion.
In my book, which I do commend to you because you probably havent read it, there is
probably the most thorough, concise description of the stamping out of religion by the
Soviet authorities that exists in English. It took me quite a long time to compile, and I
wouldnt want it to be wasted. It completely devastates the idea that the Soviet Union
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was itself some kind of religious society. There were indeed toadies, remnants of the
Orthodox Church and indeed among the Jews, who went to the Soviet authorities and
offered their assistance. They ended up all of them in prison and eventually
murdered. Their assistance was not welcome because the whole basis of this regime
was an absolute rejection of the idea there was anything beyond the material.
This is the thing which, in the days before the Soviet Union became unfashionable, in
the days when it was admired, as Cuba is still madly admired by many people in the
Western left, and as China was admired for a long time in the 1950s and 1960s, in the
time when it was admired by the very people who always admire that sort of thing,
whether it be the Sandinistas or whoever it happens to be, at that stage, that was one of
the things they admired most about it. Its still the same; utopians always hate God.
CROMARTIE: Christopher, you had a very nice comment to say about that section of
Peters book, and I think the publisher would like to hear that quote for a future blurb
advertisement. What did you just say?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:Its a very fine and muscular piece of prose, and it taught
me I thought I knew a lot about the anticlerical campaigns of the Bolshevik Party, but
theres a great deal in there that Id never read before and that I commend to you. It
would be cheap to add, but I cant not do it.
PETER HITCHENS: Oh, go on.
Christopher Hitchens, Michael Cromartie and Peter Hitchens
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:Every country that wants to emancipate itself, develop in
any way at all, eventually has to come into a confrontation with the alliance of church
and state and break it. Theres usually some correlation with how bad and rotten that
alliance is and how oppressive and how bad the rupture is.
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In America, the rupture was almost painless. It just involved disestablishing the Church
of England and forbidding by law the reestablishment of another church. Hardly anyone
had to suffer much more than confiscation or deportation for that.
In France, where the church was part of the whole criminal racket of feudalism and
monarchy, of course, it was much more cruel and violent. In Spain, during the civil war,especially in Catalonia, people felt strongly enough actually to burn the churches. Its
one of the great confrontations between my two favorite writers of the 1930s, W.H.
Auden and George Orwell.
Orwell, to my surprise, didnt much mind the churches being burned. He thought they
deserved it. Auden said, I couldnt live in a country where there were no churches. I just
couldnt. And I realized, if its of any interest, I would be the same. I couldnt do it,
myself.
But the Russian Orthodox Church, comrades, brothers, sisters, dont forget this is the
church of serfdom and slavery and autocracy. Its the church that brought us the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If the clerical and white side had won the civil war in
Russia, our word for fascism would be a Russian word, not an Italian word.
The power of that church and its wealth had to be broken and confiscated. I dont
quarrel with that. And I dont think religion should be taught in school, and I dont care
whether people have enough confidence in God or not to see his name without a capital
letter, as I think you can do in Hebrew.
PETER HITCHENS: But to have that decreed by the state?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Decreed by the state is another way of saying its the law,
as it is in the United States. You cannot teach religion in schools.
PETER HITCHENS: To have it decreed by the state that the word God could not be
used with a capital letter?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: No. Thats a bit Russian. (Laughter.)
PETER HITCHENS: When you say that you dont think religion should be taught in
schools, do you think religion should be nottaught in schools, which is more to the
point? Do you think it should be prevented by law from being taught in schools, as thesepeople most certainly did, and indeed taught in the home?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I think the home is exactly the right place for it, as long as
it doesnt come accompanied with things like genital mutilation or being told that your
neighbors of another faction are going to go to hell, or other antisocial things of that
kind. Savage beatings and torturings and so on or plural marriage or the selling of
children in dowry to goat-like old uncles in Utah. The home, yes, but no further than
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that. I dont want to have to know what your religion is. I enjoy the study of religion. Ive
taken it up because I want to. I dont want to have to know what anyone else thinks.
Keep it to yourself.
Shouldnt it make you happy? You have a redeemer. You have someone who offers you
perfect bliss and happiness if you make the right prostrations and the right (inaudible). Why isnt that enough for you? Why do I have to know what it is? Why do you have
to try and spread it? I dont want to have to know.
Michael Barone
MICHAEL BARONE, THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:I will refrain from describing my
own religious views, if any. I just want to add to what Barbara asked Christopher about
intercessory prayer and so forth. Christopher, I just think what were seeing is just an
enormous surge of affection for you from your fellow citizens of all kinds of different
beliefs and things that are grateful to have you as a fellow citizen and wish you well.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, thank you so much, Michael.
BARONE:Its quite extraordinary. In your opening remarks, you sort of sketched a
world, the post-1914 world, in which there is a secular and a nonbelieving Europe and a
Muslim world where there is much oppression in the name of religion. But havent we
also seen, looking over other large parts of the world, places where, in effect, weve
broken the alliance of church and state in generally positive respects North America,
Latin America, even India.
They still burn mosques occasionally and slaughter people, but not very much by their
historic standards. Were talking about half the population of the world, something like
that, where we really have societies where you have people of these different, often
strong faiths, sometimes nave and ignorant of fine points of dogma, as you make clear,
but also managing to live pretty peaceably with one another.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:Just to take the Muslim world for example, I would say its
almost a graph. You could do it practically as a function: How secular is this Muslim
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country and how prosperous, how open, how democratic is it, and how happy are its
people?
Its like a function. Indonesia, yes. Partly, I think, because Indonesia was more
converted than conquered by Islam. Some of it was conquered; mainly it was spread by
conversion. But Turkey, because Ataturk, in my opinion, was an atheist. He didnt haveto be to be a secularist, but it helped.
I believe he was one. He really was prepared to shoot and hang mullahs if they got in
his way of modernizing the country. And he managed to do for Turkey in a few years
what it might have taken centuries to do. Were now worried it might be undone or be in
the process of being undone, but Turkeys an exemplary country, given that its majority
population believe what they say they do in private.
Tunisia would be another example of one, the least religiously dominated the
religious partys under very careful control, not to say oppression. A society nearly as
qualified as Turkey to join the European Union. It works pretty much all the time.
Jimmy Carter, in his book on the Camp David process, says that the reason Israel is in
trouble is because it strayed from the path of the prophets. So you have to imagine that
there are people who think that if only Israel was more religious, the Camp David
process would be more
I only say that because sometimes I read things I cant imagine why people believe
them. Surely the only chance for a settlement in the region is the triumph of secularism.
And though countries like Holland may be unexciting in certain ways, the prosperity and
happiness of the Dutch surely has a great deal to do with the fact that its been a refugefrom Christian religious intolerance since the 17thcentury. The work of Spinoza and
Descartes wouldnt be possible without that kind of secularism.
So I rest what I think is a fairly persuasive case.
Sally Quinn
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SALLY QUINN, THE WASHINGTON POST: This seems to be my month for atheists. I
spent a lot of time interviewing Christopher earlier, and then a week before last, Richard
Dawkins and today, Sam Harris. Sam has just written a book called The Moral
Landscape, and Im fascinated by the issue of morality because there is this notion thatyou cant be a moral person unless you are a religious person
PETER HITCHENS: No, there isnt. You keep saying that; thats not the point. Where
do you derive your morals from?
QUINN:No, I didnt say you
PETER HITCHENS:Its not of course you can be a moral person, but where are the
morals from that youve actually recognized as morals?
QUINN:Where are the morals from? Well, actually, I didnt say that you said that. I said,there seems to be this notion. Both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Sam is a
neuroscientist, so hes talking about the science of the brain talk about how they feel
that morality is evolving and that we are becoming more moral as humans as we
evolve. Originally, when Confucius first came up with the notion of the Golden Rule, it
was seen more as an idea of practicality or pragmatism, that society was not functioning
and you needed some idea that would bring people together in a community in order to
keep them safe and in order to have a functional society.
As religion has taken over that role, morality has become sort of the province of religion.
And now that religion seems to be questioned often these days, people are looking atmorality from a different point of view and saying that religion really is not as important
in terms of basing your moral positions and your values and your ethics on. But the idea
is simply evolving into an idea that morality is there because its part of the human brain
were hardwired to be moral and that we are becoming more so every day.
Christopher Hitchens
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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I owe a reply to what Peter said earlier about law, which
could serve for this as well. I dont know about every day, by the way, Sally, that were
getting better and better. Im not sure. I think there are peaks and troughs. I think were
doomed to fluctuation in this regard.
But I think that were probably doomed to some kind of relativism, or perhaps better tosay approximation. Who is going to tell me, here is a law that is absolutely true and will
hold good for all time and has been proclaimed scripturally? We might say, thou shalt
not kill. It would be probably inevitable we would have to start with that. But it doesnt
say, thou shalt not kill. It says, thou shall do no murder, and everybody knows that there
is a real difficulty in deciding when killing is murder and that the situational ethics of this
are very complicated but are common to all times and places.
Different standards prevail at different times, but that argument is an open-ended one
and will remain so. Im rather glad, as a matter of fact, from the point of both moral and
intellectual and ethical exercise, that you cant just tell someone one thing, that thatsright and thats true for all time, and theres nothing to argue about. Thats why I object
to the idea of commandments in the first place. Morality is not learned by orders. Its
acquired by experience, by moral suasion, and by comparing and contrasting different
ways of resolving these questions.
There are thought crimes in the Ten Commandments. You are told you shouldnt even
envy someone elses prosperity or property. Well, from a Socialist point of view, that
says youve got to just lump it if people are better off than you, and from a capitalist and
free-enterprise point of view, it says, its basically a crime to emulate this whole spur
of emulation and innovation is possibly a sin.
And anyway, its in the same list as murder as a crime something youre thinking. I
dont think thats an absolute moral truth at all. To the contrary, I think wed be better off
without it. So where do we get it? Its perfectly obvious that we happen to be, as other
primates are, capable of and needing to make decisions about our common welfare, as
well as about our own ambition. We happen to be stuck with that.
PETER HITCHENS: The question of conscience, or what Sally referred to as the
hardwiring of the brain, seems to me to be one of the most fascinating, unexplored
subjects in this matter, and it seems to me to be very, very hard to come up with an
atheistic explanation of conscience, any more than you could have a compass without amagnetic north.
If morality evolves, then morality changes. Then the things of which we most strongly
disapprove now could be things which are permitted later, in which case its not really
morality, as far as Im concerned. And whos evolving it? I love that advertisement
maybe it didnt happen here Microsoft Office has evolved, by which they meant,
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weve gone back and tried to make it a bit better than it was and a bit more like what
Apple does.
That doesnt seem to me to be evolution as generally understood, but the word does
seem to have a remarkable number of meanings. But if it evolves, then it alters, and if it
alters, its not morality, and therefore, we cant rely upon it. If the magnetic north keptshifting, then it would be very difficult to steer your boat or your plane across the
Atlantic.
QUINN: Well then, do you need religion to be moral?
PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, absolutely. Morality is what you do when you think nobody is
looking. And theres a lot of things I would do if I didnt believe in God.
CROMARTIE: I think both of our authors have spoken to this in their books, and so I
would call your attention to their books.
Timothy Garton Ash
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, THE GUARDIAN: I actually wanted to follow up exactly
where you left off. I think the question on the exam paper has been answered by
Hitchens, P. entirely satisfactorily: Can civilization survive without God? Answer: clearly
yes. You mentioned Japan; one could also say China. If the question is, can civilization
survive without an ethical or moral order, the answer is, clearly no almost
definitionally. So the question is, can you have a strong, durable ethical or moral order
without some transcendent or supernatural basis? That seems to me the question were
posing here.
Interestingly, Tony Judt, shortly before he died, in the Charlie Rose interview was asked
this question. He was an absolute nonbeliever, and he said, I find people, when they
say they believe something, when they have a stand of principle, quite like an absolute
or transcendent justification of it. It makes it easier for them to stand strongly for it.
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I think the question to Christopher here is, you mentioned that were doomed to some
sort of a relativism. Youre getting very close to someone you often criticized, Isaiah
Berlin, who famously said at the end of his four essays on liberty, the challenge we face
is to recognize the relativity of our beliefs and yet to stand for them absolutely.
Thats quite a difficult thing to do. How do we do that, and do you think we really can getthat without what were going on with at the moment in Western Europe or in England,
which is actually a sort of secularized Christianity, or secularized post-Christianity? I
mean, your heroes, the Jeffersons, the Madisons, the Tom Paines, the Orwells. It was a
sort of secularized post-Christianity.
CROMARTIE:Why dont we gather up these final questions, and then well let you all
answer all of them, so take notes.
PETER WEHNER, COMMENTARY MAGAZINE:Id like to return to the metaphor of
tennis and ask Christopher and Peter to return their own serves, in a sense. To you,
Christopher, what do you think is the greatest contribution of Christianity, either writ
large in terms of society or writ small in terms of individual lives? And for you, Peter,
what do you find is the most compelling argument that the atheists make and the
strongest argument against Christianity, the ones that trouble you the most, whether
science or the existence of evil?
Timothy Dalrymple
TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE, PATHEOS.COM: This is related to what Pete just asked. It
strikes me that as individuals become champions for particular philosophies, it becomes
difficult to project anything that might conflict with the public persona or might conflict
with an image of immaculate certainty in your own point of view. I know that heroes of
faith can find it difficult to confess doubts, and Im wondering if the same follows for
heroes of nonfaith. So the question is, are there moments in which this is for both
brothers moments in which you doubt the philosophies you have come to represent
in the public mind, and if so, what brings those moments about?
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SUSAN GLASSER, FOREIGN POLICY: I was interested in your discussion about
Russia and the campaign to stamp out Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, especially
because of the famous moment at which Stalin backed away from his crusade against
religion, which was, of course, in World War II when the threat from Germany was
proving to be existential. Immediately, Stalin, in the defense of Moscow, put the
Orthodox priests, such as remained, front and center once again in the effort to reorientSoviet rhetoric away from ideology and return it to nationalism.
Susan Glasser
So my question to you is, how does that cause you to look, perhaps in a different way,
at your question between the connection to ideology and nationalism? This is not about
personal morality as much, this question, but to both of you, I would be curious as to
your answers as to where you see the connection between religion and nationalism to
be.
CROMARTIE: OK, we have four questions on the table more than four, butChristopher, will you go first?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:I used to ask a question. Ive now asked it in public, on
the radio, in print, in TV debates with quite a lot of leading religious figures and thinkers.
Its simply this: You ought to be able to tell me of a moral action performed or an ethical
statement made by a believer that I couldnt make because Im a nonbeliever. You
ought to be able. Given what you think, it must be very easy for you to say, heres
something you couldnt say or do that would be morally right or morally true. No takers; I
havent found a single example. Ive tried everyone now and by the way, theres a
prize. And Ive even entered myself for it, as Ill tell you in a second.
But if I was to say to someone, now can you name me please a hideous immoral act
undertaken or an immoral remark made by someone because of their faith not in its
name, but because of it youve already thought of one. Now youve thought of
another one, and youll keep on thinking of them. So I think that pretty much disposes of
the question, with its implied insult, that without faith one would have no ground for, say,
acting rightly when no one else was looking or answering the promptings of conscience.
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Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Wasa was starting his work in the
Polish shipyards and the Polish militia, the outer ring of the Polish army were closing in
on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then-fairly small group, and he was asked,
arent you frightened, arent you afraid? Youve taken on a whole all-powerful state and
army arent you scared? And he said, Im not frightened of anything but God or
anyone but God.
This came back to me. I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. Its certainly a noble
thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldnt have said
it. So it does meet both my criteria. But it was also the slogan of Gen. Edwin Walker of
the John Birch Society in a different situation the man whom Lee Harvey Oswald
took target practice on, right-wing, paranoid Crusade for Christ nutbag in the 50s.
Doesnt sound so good when its said by him and its a summons to think of nuclear war
as not too bad, for example. Its not quite the same.
So there, Ive partly answered the question. I hope I partly asked one. Christianitysgreatest contribution. I havent been asked that in those terms before, but I find it
strangely easy to say what it would be from the prayers I used to intone and the hymns
and psalms I used to sing and the lessons I used to read and hear. The greatest
contribution of Christianity in my life is the reminder of the complete ephemerality of
human power, and indeed of human existence the transience of all states, empires,
heroes, grandiose claims, and so forth. Thats always with me, and I daresay I could
have got that from Einstein I would have and from Darwin, too. But the way I got it
and the way its implanted in me is certainly by Christianity.
(Audio break.)
In what moments do I think, what if Im wrong? I always think its probably a weakness
in me because I always like to think that in any argument I can return my own serve. If I
was appointed to speak on the other side of a debate, I could do it. I could make the
case, say, for leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq, and you wouldnt know that I
didnt believe it. But I couldnt do it for religion. I am one of those people whom Pascal
has in mind in his Penses, which he addresses, if you remember, to those who are so
made that they cannot believe. Under no persuasion could I be made to believe that a
human sacrifice several thousand years ago vicariously redeems me from sin. Nothing
could persuade me that that was true or moral, by the way. Just I cant its
(audio break) predisposition to faith.
And then finally, yes, of course. One of the great disfigurements of Christianity, and not
just in Russia, has been where I began, with Diarmaid MacCullochs account of the self-
destruction, self-immolation, of Christendom, its identification with Rome or Byzantium.
Remember, the Crusaders first destroyed Byzantine Christianity, having more or less
polished off the Jews on their